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Total recall
John Butler writes from ‘a council’ where the new document management system is having problems. After a smooth introduction ‘the project manager realised the team was not getting replies to email messages about the project’, he says.
That might be because the project was named Recall, so anyone receiving an email about the project assumed that the email was simply recalling the last email about the project, and did not bother to open it.
And as John points out, naming your document management project after the process for fixing faults on cars does not send out a positive message – whether or not you read it. Any more unfortunate project names?
We did a project in Europe, where one component was called "MFQMS". We were careful to always spell this out in front of most customers (bar one). Internally, we used the codename "MuffQ..." well. you can guess the rest.
As the chap wasnt a native english speaker, he of course assumed that particular phrase was okay to use..
A year or so after we left, he used it in a huge roundtable meeting containing native english speakers - causing mass uproar...
I'd love to claim credit for this genius, but that has to fall to a colleague on this project..
---* Bill
Posted by :Wild Bill | March 14, 2007 1:23 PM